Wall of Flesh from Terraria

Possibly the last thing you would like to find in your lunchbox...and the last thing you would want to put in your child's lunchbox.

Or...

Definitive evidence that the napkin project has "jumped the shark."

Firstly, in defense of the indefensible, I want to mention that this image was specifically requested by my sons...at least in the abstract. They have been avidly playing a game called Terraria.   Similar to Minecraft, it is a two dimensional "sandbox game.'  If you are not the parent of video game playing kids, and/or that does not mean anything to you: The players can alter the environment, collect raw materials and build things. There are also animals to exploit and bad guys and "bosses" (ultimate bad guys) to battle.

The kids had requested the "main boss of the underworld," this "Wall of Flesh."(helpfully abbreviated as "WoF") I discovered this morning that they had not yet reached the appropriate level in the game and didn't really know what the WoF looked like. I had googled last night after they went to sleep and was indeed dubious that I was going to be able to come up with something that could go to lunch without inducing nausea. Delusionally, I decided to forge ahead and try to pretty it up a bit.

How can I explain that decision?
It was late and I didn't know what else to draw? I had been at an indoor water park over the preceding weekend and inhaled so many chlorine byproducts that my judgement was impaired? (Ironically, after a few hours at the park, my eyes looked quite a bit like these eyes on the napkin, but less attractive).

As to why I used the phrase "jumped the shark": I mean that less in the sense of "the point at which something that was once great reaches a point of sharp decline in quality and popularity" and more in the sense that I have been drawing these napkins for a long time and am willing to try something that is destined for failure just for variety's sake.  Many of the napkins end up with a similar format: a character or two close up in the foreground and some indeterminate sky and green stuff in the far background.  We just don't have too many hot pink walls of anything.

There have been other gross napkin failures in the past. Most memorable among them was the night that Archer perversely insisted that what he really, really wanted on his napkin was "a cut toenail blasting a pile of poop with a laser." Yes, model parent that I am, I tried to draw that for him. And yes, my tone here is sarcastic. I didn't do a particularly good job (It was no "WoF"!)  I think that the casual viewer would have assumed the image was a strange piece of modernist sculpture spraying yellow paint on a large pile of soft serve chocolate ice cream. Maybe.

Archer, in his then 5 year old wisdom, decided not to take the toenail napkin to school.
And this morning, Ansel sagely took a napkin picturing Paddington Bear holding a lightsaber.


Here's the WoF in the game: